This book was born from the consciousness that contemporary American novels mostly reflect the complexity of present-day Western society and the limited role that the human being can play in it. Along these lines, the editor coordinated the work of a group of lecturers from the Department of English and German Studies at the University of Zaragoza who were concerned with such issues as myth, history, the new physics or metafiction as key terms to understand the task of the contemporary American novelist. After outlining in its opening chapter a general panorama of this type of narrative, the volume offers a series of essays on well-known authors. Their topics range from Hemingway's relevance to the contemporary scene, to the relationship between the new physics and the contemporary novel as reflected in Vonnegut's tragicomic Slaughterhouse-5, without forgetting the reappraisal of myth in such works as John Barth's The End of the Road or Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.